Is Kaltura for me?

2 replies [Last post]

Thu, 07/30/2009 - 12:57

Joined: 07/30/2009

Points: 10

Hello,

I found out about Kaltura accidently, while searching for an flv player. After reading about different projects, I am very much confused. I find Kaltura to be a very powerful software with lots and lots of features and capabilities. But my requirements are not very huge. And I am not sure whether Kaltura is a good solution for me. This is what I want.

I have subscribed to an online video news agency who will provide me with about 2-3 videos in flv format every day. These videos will be stored on my server and will be played using a hosted web player (KDP for example). Another news agencey has offered me their videos, but they require me to display their videos in their own player. I also want to occasionally add videos from video sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe etc, which will be viewed in their respective players. Will Kaltura CE allow me to manage all these videos? Or is Kaltura too powerful for my needs, that it is not worth the time / server resources spent in installing/running the Kaltura server?

Hope someone will be able to give me some insight into this.

Thanks in advance,
Joyce

Thu, 07/30/2009 - 23:20

Chris Hocking

Joined: 04/05/2009

Points: 344

I've tried to explain as best I can what Kaltura is to another confused person on another thread:

http://www.kaltura.org/installing-extension

...hopefully this will clear up some confusion as to what exactly Kaltura is and what it's used for.

In answer to your question however, Kaltura may or may not be suitable for your purposes.

One possible solution would be to install Kaltura CE on your server and use that to manage all your video content. This would handle all the "back-end" side of things. You could then install Drupal, Wordpress or a custom piece of software to act as your "front-end" (i.e. the interface that users of the system will interact with).

To get media into your system you could create a script that downloads the 2-3 videos in FLV format from your online video news agency, and automatically imports them into your Kaltura database. This would be fairly straight forward to do.

For other media which you don't have copyright permission to, you could just embed this media directly into either Wordpress posts/pages, Drupal pages or your custom solution. Kaltura CE will not be able to manage this media however.

If you went down the Wordpress path for example, once you install Kaltura CE, you could basically forget about it and do all the actual managing of your data directly from Wordpress. Thanks to the very open API that Wordpress uses, you could easily streamline the whole process so that you don't have to do as much stuff manually (i.e. you could create a script that automatically creates new posts with embedded YouTube videos when the content becomes available). This kind of stuff is beyond the scope of these forums - but there are plenty of Wordpress forums out there that can help you with this kind of thing.

Alternatively you could just scrap Kaltura all together, and store those FLV files as you normally would on the web server, and just use something like the JW FLV Media Player to display the FLV videos. Or you could just use the KDP and link to those FLV files (without having them stored on the Kaltura Network).

There are lots of different ways you could do this, and it all depends on what you're after as an end result...

I hope this helps!

Best Regards, Chris!

Sat, 08/01/2009 - 06:37

Joyce

Joined: 07/30/2009

Points: 10

Thanks for the detailed reply Chris. I want to integrate the videos to my existing website. So I thought it would be better not to use Kaltura, because I won't be using most of its features.

I have one more doubt about the license. To use KDP should my entire website, including the php codes, be licensed under GNU Affero Public License? I have a vB installation on my site.